


Verses

by Oxygen



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Junkenstein, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-08 21:22:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12262332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oxygen/pseuds/Oxygen
Summary: little universes i create for junkrat and roadhog.





	1. sundowning

_“The Very Large Array is the most powerful, flexible, and widely-used radio telescope in the world.”_

 

Earth passes by them, brush and dirt and trees and buildings, there were buildings at some point. The dashboard shakes, the glass jitters, Jamison’s tremors get worse, and the sun sinks beneath New Mexico.

The sundown has never felt less beautiful.

Mako turns on the self-automated driving. Blacks out the windows. Leaves the sun roof open.

 

The sun roof.

 

“Mako, what’s on your mind?”

“The Large Array.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Sure?”

 

Yeah.

 

The glass is matte black. The overhead light is warm, like a sun, far far away, not this one. Through the oculus in the car, the stars appear. They stay suspended in space.

 

_“The Very Large Array is the most powerful, flexible, and widely-used radio telescope in the world. We visited it in 1998, when we lived in Las Cruces. We had just watched Contact. I told you the last three drivers looked too pale to be in the middle of New Mexico for any other reason.”_

_Mako’s words melt away._

_“You laughed, and looked at your arms. You had a tan, like you do now. You put your hand on my arm, told me you were going to out-tan me if I didn’t get out more. Sitting at an office crunching numbers all day wasn’t good for my physical health. You told me I was an ordinary guy with extraordinary ideas, a guy with a Harley-Davidson rotting in his garage that he should fix up and take out for a spin._

_“You told me we should run away.”_

 

_You told me a lot I couldn’t keep up with. You and the world flew by me, but you stopped._

 

_N--_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_“The Very Large Array is the most powerful, flexible, and widely-used radio telescope in the world.”_

 

Terracotta and old gold passes by them, shadows and smudges and hatching and lines against the window, there was too much color at some point. He’s jostled, his hands fly out of his lap, his throat ties up in knots and his head feels too heavy on him.

 

The sundown has never felt less beautiful.

 

The sundown takes him with it.

 

The stars are too bright, too close in the Outback.

 

The car is too clean for the Outback.

 

The car.

 

 

 

 

The seats.

 

 

 

 

The color shifts back and forth in front of him.


	2. ascending hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> old story. reuploaded.

Groaning. Creaking. Water drips from the ceiling, splashes on Jamison’s forehead as he awakens.

He looks up. It’s hard to see the ceiling-- the holder is high as hell and dark as the night, with only some light bouncing off of consoles and an opening up top. Hard to see the floor too. He’s suspended by chains too ancient-looking, too ancient-feeling, for the futuristic design of the holder.

He wiggles his prosthetics. Least they let him keep those.

 

Jamison doesn’t know how or why he got here. Suppose it doesn’t matter. He knows he’s being held in a carrier, knows that suits are behind this. The clouds whip by and an ocean stretches below him, gray and unending and viciously indifferent to their plight.

His head hurts. He turns to see Roadhog-- no, his creation-- suspended beside him in a heavy, sleek stock that protrudes from the wall. He blinks, shakes his head, looks again. That’s definitely Roadhog. Who is his creation?

The walls and floors are sparsely lined with oddities like them-- old soldiers, medics, beasts with a posture too sentient for his liking. Deadly quiet. Deadly unresponsive.

 

He begins… slipping. He should be falling, but something’s wrong-- time, the room, it flows like sand through his hands, through his head, through his eyes, and then Roadhog looms behind him. A voice commands the man, a voice without volume, one he understands, knows it exists, knows it plays over a loudspeaker but can’t  _hear--_

Roadhog grips his waist. Jamison can feel the regret, the anger, the powerlessness in his fingertips. Lightning rips through him. He doesn’t waste time on the details. He can hear himself sobbing, knows tears stream down his bodyguard’s face. For a second, he sees both Roadhog and his creation, suspended and intersecting and oscillating and  _existing_  in ways that shouldn’t be possible but make sense to him.

 

He blinks. Different setting, different time. He sees his limp body being carted away through various rooms. He sees himself thrown out of the carrier, through the clouds-- thrashing, hadn’t died _\--_ into the vast expanse below.

He blinks again. Jamison Junkenstein is equipped with bombs, the know-how, and the liberty Junkrat did not have. He plans to put it all to good use. He rigs explosives on the floor, on the wall, doesn’t know why. Blows a hole through the carrier. Turns his attention to the console. The holes cease to exist.

 

“There’s no one to stop me now!” He shouts to no one in particular, to everyone in particular, to prisoners he came to rescue that no longer line the walls. Not that he notices.

 

He hijacks a console. Various visuals load-- oscilloscopes, bars, graphs, gray, green, red,  _Welcome, Dr. Junkenstein_ \-- and his creation bursts through the console. It stands besides him, ready to tear through the the doors of the holder, through anyone that stands before him, electricity illuminating their corner of the room.

Someone knocks behind wall of the container that held his creation. Fervent, unreal knocking, the wall juts forward and back to the rhythm of the beating. A prisoner. He knocks back to let them know he’s working on it, that he'll have them out in no time--

 

A blank slip--

He blinks, the door--

 

The events happen simultaneously. He opens a door on the other end of the room. The prisoner behind the walls slips him a paper, blank until he sees a golden scythe slice through the air just centimeters from his fingertips. He jumps back, heart racing.

 

Neatly printed: _Your escape ticket is an arm or a leg._

 

It was a warning. If he tries to leave, the golden scythe cuts through him as he steps out. Then, it was a shit deal-- they hack a limb off and he’s “free to go”, even as he bleeds to death or sinks to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Now, it’s an offer. They’ll upgrade one of his prosthetic limbs, hell,  _bring it back_ if he wants to (whatever that means, it’s a limb like any other now as far as he’s concerned.) He just has to leave his creation behind.

 

_How depraved are you, Doctor Jamison Junkenstein? Will you leave your life’s work in our hands in exchange for your freedom? Will you leave a sentient being to suffer alone in the dark for the rest of eternity, knowing that his master left him in favor of his own pursuits?_

 

Absolutely not.

 

 

 

Show’s over. The TV shuts off. The simulation powers down. The dream ends.

 

He drifts back to consciousness. He’s in his shack, back in Australia, back in reality. Hog lies next to him, sleeping, dreaming, soft leather skin draped loosely over the both them. Moonlight filters in through a glassless window across the room.

It’s the night before they leave this shithole once and for all. They’ve got all of the supplies they need, plus a boat they’ve scrapped together in the last few months. Know how and why they’re going to make the drive to the ocean undeterred. Plan to drift around the coast to New Zealand, rendezvous with some old pals, and from there, it’s the world.

 

Gonna be the first time Jamison interacts with civvies and suits, if everything goes right, which there's even no guarantee of. Reckon that’s why he dreamt what he did, with the suits and the ocean and all.

 

He looks at Hog again. The big man seems to be in a peaceful slumber, belly expanding and contracting languidly, snoring without a care in the world.

…but perhaps he isn’t. Perhaps he’s enchained in a carrier ten kilometers above the earth, with the clouds whipping by him and an ocean ready to swallow him whole.

 

Perhaps Hog doesn’t dream at all.

 

He rests a hand on Hog's face. His eyes flutter open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anon wanted me to write a fic for a dream I had, a TV show where Junkrat was being held hostage in some kind of carrier. Tried to capture it to the best of my ability.


	3. 18 Megahertz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The song cuts abruptly for a message from the broadcaster; real old dude, voice deep and cracking from age. He tells them that the clocks have just hit 12.
> 
> (old story. reuploaded.)

Jamie keeps the hideout comfortably busy to the eye. Messy, but in a cozy, “home sweet home” kind of way. It’s especially pleasing during Christmas.

They’ve got some tires of varying sizes for a couch, with a soft leather skin slung over it as a makeshift blanket. Tables topped with gadgets and eskies full of lukewarm beer and salted lizard strips surround it in a circular formation. A radio sits in the center.

The couch is nested in the lowest part of the hut, with the ceiling hanging snugly over it, casting a constant shadow over the couch no matter the time of day. Makes for a good nap location.

During December, Jamie drapes some makeshift fairy lights from the ceiling over the couch. They cascade over the inset in the room like one of the bead curtains in the bars of Perth. When Jamie connects them to the portable generator, they cast a warm golden glow over the room.

Jamie always feels the need to explain why he's putting the lights up. Mako lets him ramble on about keeping the spirit of Christmas alive, and the importance of national holidays to the human psyche and whatnot.

In all honesty, Mako doesn't need a justification-- but he knows Jamie typically doesn’t like wasting resources, and the man needs a way of justifying it to himself.

On Christmas Eve, they tune the radio to one of the local Junker station. They’re playing Christmas hits from America and England, stuff from ancient movies and covers by musicians from another age. Some beer cans and shish kebab sticks litter the floor. They’re lying comfortably on their couch, looking at the night sky through the large, glass-less window on the other side of the hut.

Jamie’s on his back with the blanket haphazardly covering him. He’s fiddling with the fairy lights, delicately weaving them in between his fingers.

The song cuts abruptly for a message from the broadcaster; real old dude, voice deep and cracking from age. He tells them that the clocks have just hit 12. Jamie looks over at him with a lazy smile on his face, and laces his fingers with Mako’s own.

“Merry Christmas, ya big lug.”


	4. Die Architekten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> based on The Physicists, and the fun inversion Junkenstein's Revenge has on the tale of Frankenstein.

He is safe in the ward, better to be a madman than to be responsible for acts, inhumane acts, inhuman acts, beyond the comprehension, beyond the foresight, of a compassionate human.

 

There is some irony to this. He hears the voice of God. He commands Jamison (lowercase, unwritten lowercase) to stare at the embers, to read the eyes of other men for their messages, to cease eating and drinking and breathing until the tremors reach his brain and he collapses and

 

Dr. Jamison Junkenstein could be here, in another life. The nurses are compassionate. The care is excellent. The ward is fit for a schizophrenic with the odd low day.

 

But Dr. Jamison Junkenstein has been to Hell and back. He has seen the Truth he needs to move on from the voice of God that is not a God that exists as a god a fake god a god God GOD that torments him nonetheless, but exists as something which does not matter and should not matter and should not get in the way of what he has Discovered.

 

These are things he can prove and see. Things that other people see him make, that help their lives, that some turn down, some reject, some laugh at, things that exist enough to be noted by others as he looks them in the eye and at their mouths as they speak. Lipreader. Lipreader. Reads “robots.”

 

Dr Jamison Junkenstein is a mechanical engineer. A chemist. A biologist. A programmer. A liar.

 

But above all, an Architect.

 

Today, liar in a ward is the close second.

 

He calls himself Moebius. King Solomon speaks to him, of Grandiose Plans, of light and numbers and energies from humans and electronics which he rattles on about to the nurses like a grandfather rattles on to his progeny, sweet and slow and just a bit forgetful. Jamison smiles warmly. The nurses smile tightly. Light filters through the window, brings out the dust of the room on the way to the farthest wall. He (lowercase, all lowercase) is a scientist past his prime.

 

These plans have already happened. Reanimation. Artificial intelligence. Real artificial intelligence. Pointless to differentiate it from one’s own intelligence. The two merging together and converging to create digital immortality, and something else.

 

The omnics, he’s called them.

 

The omnics will die with him.

 

The omnics will die with the Architect of a digital world.

 

Moebius came to him in a dream. A man from another universe, who failed to contain the power of his discoveries. Jamison considers himself a lucky man, a man who can turn unfortunate tales inside out and backwards. He will succeed where Moebius failed.

 

And he does.

 

He brings Mako to life, all on his own. Lord Reinhardt realizes this, finally “realizes his genius.” Lord Reinhardt’s room and cape and crown and hands are oozing in green and red, what navy, what gold?

 

He burns the lab. The papers. Runs to the wards. The wards are run by the state, a higher power (lowercase) than the extent of Lord Reinhardt’s court.

 

Lord Reinhardt sends agents. The agents kill a nurse, under the pretenses that Jamison has killed the nurse, which keeps him alive. The killings are wrong, they enrage him, and they work against him all the while working for him. Why? Lord Reinhardt knows Jamison’s plans, his lies, knows others know, knows he must keep Jamison alive under the popular pretense of being a maniac and get him back to the court.

 

He convinces the agents to turn their backs on the Lord. Shows them his lab in a show of faith, what he has found, what he has accomplished, what others think they could accomplish with the omnics. Gives them a taste for the murk around their foresight. Humans are not benevolent creatures, they think they have learned today as the nurse’s blood finishes drying, but the extent of their violence is beyond…

 

“Jamison.”

 

“Doctor Ziegler.”

 

Doctor Ziegler has bypassed the warning system around his room.

 

She is the head doctor of the ward. She holds a crystal in her hands. Green. Soft. Glowing. Etched with patterns, the pattern of the omnic motherboards.

 

His crystal of life, a mere concept, scattered far and few in between coded notebooks, brought to life.

 

This should not have happened.

 

“Give that back!” He snarls, lunges. Ziegler presses a pistol against his head.

 

“I can bring your creations to life,” she tells him. “We have the resources here. Let us help you.”

 

“You know damn well what’ll happen!” He curses. The pretenses are being shaken off. Rough voice, not the senile, jubilant, unhinged Moebius, the violent, dizzying daisychain, overflowing river of thoughts and anger and fear that is Junkenstein.

 

The doctors lock eyes. He hyperventilates.

 

“You’ll never be able to get an omnic out of that. It’s a phony. You need me,” he reasons. Reasons. Reason. Reason. reason, reason reasons Reasons, reasons reasons, Reasons,

 

“And you’ve reasoned wrong,” she replies. An omnic steps into the room.

 

“Animatronic,” he breathes.

 

It turns to him, movements too human, subtle swing, twitch of the head, breathing imitated as the light in its eyes falls from light to dark to light to dark to light, too human for the current state of mechanical engineering to fake. It is his work.

 

“Hello, Jamison. I’ve been waiting for this day.”

 

The line he programmed, weaved into the code, buried, hidden, only know to him.

 

This is the beginning of the end.

 

Coward, you coward, you coward, you coward, you.

 

He grabs the gun, the element of surprise and sheer size on his side. This isn’t what Moebius would want. Moebius would atone for his sins, but Junkenstein isn’t Moebius. He cannot bear seeing his creations misused.

 

He closes his eyes and pulls the trigger.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They could not reanimate the good doctor. She had predicted as much; A doctor expert in reanimation would protect himself against it. _How_ was unknown to them, but they did not need him. He gave them everything they needed, encrypted, but there.

 

Shame the doctor wasn’t an expert cryptographer.

 

Doctor Ziegler sits at her desk, shuffling the late Dr. Junkenstein’s notes. Clack, clack, clack, grips the folder, papers lined up within and edges lined up hitting the desk and the papers and the edges and clack clack clack and CLACK she’s being watched. These are not her thoughts.

 

Those were not her Discoveries.

 

The desk monitor comes to life.

 

Across scrolls the message, across the screen, it says:

 

_The omnics will die with the Architect of a digital world._

  
  
  


And from the hills, he watches the omnium burn.

  
  


He is not Moebius because he would succeed where Moebius failed.

  


A chip in his head. Rigged to note the time of death. Rigged to send a signal. Rigged to disintegrate back into his bloodstream.

 

Rigged to open the eyes of another, far away, to alert Mako of his return, to bring Dr. Jamison back to life.

 

A killswitch embedded deeper into the omnium, the omnics, than a simple Hello. Nestled within killswitches and killswitches and false leads and real leads and the truth (lowercase) and

 

His foresight was short to the evils men could (and would) do with his technology (for his technonolgy.)

 

But it was long long, very long, much longer, to the games his technology could play.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
